Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

So I keep seeing complaints about smite arise even after the nerf to malefic lords (who were the most notorious smite spam offendors due to their low points costs and 4+ invul saves). And this kind of surprises me. I have yet to spend much time on the receiving end of smite spam, and there isn't a ton of it to be found around town. So I'm asking you lot to help me understand the "smite = OP" mentality that most people seem to agree about. What is it that makes smite so notoriously problematic in its current incarnation? From my limited knowledge...

*Malefic lords were a big deal because they were cheap, screenable, and had an invul that made them tough to take down even if you happened to reach them or bring sniper rifles. However, my understanding is that malefic lords have been recosted to make taking one of them a pricey investment and spamming them downright ill-advised.

*Imperial psykers are, as I understand it, pretty cheap and costed similarly to a malefic lord's old cost, but they're relatively susceptible to snipers, deepstrikers, etc. due to not having an invul in the first place. Additionally, the infamous conscript blobs that were once used to shield them have become much less of an issue now that they're vulnerable to morale tests. So while I could see smite spam + screens for imperials being effective in the right circumstances, it looks like the sort of thing you can deal with on paper.

*Elite armies with psykers (eldar, marines, etc.) have some reasonably powerful psykers, but their limited numbers and lack of cheap screens make me think I could probably blunt the effectiveness of their smiters with bubblewrap.

*Armies that can put "smite" on nearly every unit (thousand sons, grey knights, maybe eldar if you really went for warlock spam or something) generally only do 1 wound with smite. Which isn't a bad tool to have on your utility belt, but I'm not really intimidated by the threat of 1 mortal wound per enemy unit. Especially considering these armies can generally be dealt with using bubble wrap.

So I'm probably missing something really obvious. This isn't me saying, "get good." I believe that I am most likely completely oblivious to a significant consideration that has lead to all the talk of how smite needs to be nerfed of late. My armies tend to feature expensive, elite units that are theoretically great targets for smite, so I'd like to be able to spot smite spam danger coming. Plus, I don't really feel qualified to chime in during conversations about smite when I don't properly understand it.

So... what am I missing?

Tzeentzch.
Say hello to my dirt cheap blue and brim stone horror spam, each unit gets to cast smite.

The other thing that makes smite spam so powerful is guess who does not need to follow character targeting rules when using it? Thats right this guy, means you can snipe out characters with it.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Tzeentzch.
Say hello to my dirt cheap blue and brim stone horror spam, each unit gets to cast smite.

The other thing that makes smite spam so powerful is guess who does not need to follow character targeting rules when using it? Thats right this guy, means you can snipe out characters with it.

Uh... You might want to talk to your local Tzeentch player because it sounds like they've been screwing with you. Smite only hits the closest enemy model, it's the other, usually weaker damaging spells like Infernal Gaze that can pick any target within range.

As for the OP, it is largely an issue with the super underpriced psykers that Chaos used to get and Guard still gets. Eldar would be on this list but they have such a preposterous number of good psychic powers they don't even have the room to cast smite more than a couple times so shrug.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Tzeentzch.
Say hello to my dirt cheap blue and brim stone horror spam, each unit gets to cast smite.

The other thing that makes smite spam so powerful is guess who does not need to follow character targeting rules when using it? Thats right this guy, means you can snipe out characters with it.

Not unless the character is the closest visible model, since you cannot target smite beyond that for any unit.

Opes! disreguard im thinking AoS smite been a while since i have done 8th. But as stated its the spamming on under costed units. For a while there the brimstone and blue horror list was just bonkers.

Smite isn't all that big of a problem. As others have said, the problem is with cheaper psykers that have full smite that can be spammed.

mortal wounds should've never gotten out of the gate in their current form. The "you take wounds and there's nothing you can do about it" mechanic should be reserved for orbital strikes, titan explosions, and the like.

They just need to make the other 90% of mortal wounds into auto wounds at ap values based on the thing (minus a lot for smite and most other powers, minus a little or none for junk transports exploding.) Invuln saves shouldn't be so easily bypassed.

Thanks to mortal wounds having no degree of scaling whatsoever, like half the powers in the game are "smite but slightly different."

 Backspacehacker wrote:
Opes! disreguard im thinking AoS smite been a while since i have done 8th. But as stated its the spamming on under costed units. For a while there the brimstone and blue horror list was just bonkers.

Are horrors still a problematic source of smite spam? I may be mistaken, but I thought brimstones only got the flat 1 damage version of smite, and I thought pink horrors had to have at least 11 guys to get regular smite. At which point, you're spending ~100 points per smite. Or am I completely off?




Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
Smite isn't all that big of a problem. As others have said, the problem is with cheaper psykers that have full smite that can be spammed.

What units would be included in the list of 'cheap psykers" these days? I know my warlocks are cheap, but they get destrucotr smite. I know imperials have a few different psykers to pick from, but I was under the impression that they were mostly 4 wounds or less with no save worth mentioning leaving them vulnerable to snipers, etc. And the consensus seems to be that malefic lords are suboptimal now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 niv-mizzet wrote:
mortal wounds should've never gotten out of the gate in their current form. The "you take wounds and there's nothing you can do about it" mechanic should be reserved for orbital strikes, titan explosions, and the like.

Is it really fair to think of smite as a "there's nothing you can do about it" mechanic though? You can screen your expensive units, take psykers and anti-psyker options of your own (assuming your faction has any), use certain stratagems, etc. Excluding things like special rules and stratagems that let you actively resist incoming attacks, it actually kind of seems like you have more ability to actively resist enemy smites than you do enemy shooting. Sure, smite is relatively efficient against heavily armored, expensive models, but isn't that comparable to a meltagun being efficient against a vehicle?

From the perspective of someone who has a tzeentch force that probably wont see the table for some time; smite is boring. It's exactly the problem I had with Str D and stomp in 7th edition. I roll a couple dice and then tell you how many models you have the pleasure of taking off the table. What? You paid a butt tonne of points for your high toughness, good armor and invulnerable saves? Well you will think twice before doing that again, won't you? Except it's even more of a problem because literally every psyker in the game has access to it. What's worse is that if you are playing a psychic heavy force you often don't have enough alternative psychic powers to get you away from smiting at least a couple times. This is made all the worse by the fact that roughly half of the other options most armies have for psychic powers are smite but worse.

That's the problem I have with smite at least. It makes the psychic phase incredibly boring for everyone involved. It's far too easy to spam and in many cases it incentivizes you using it over other codex specific psychic powers.

There's no problem with smite.

There is a problem with some units which can't a full normal power smite and we're/are very cheap to purchase. That is a points issue not a smite issue.

Further almost every army with a codex has a way to save versus smite be it a faction special rule that let's them get a 6+ or 5+ to ignore wounds, or stratagem s that give saves versus mortal wounds.

The issues are
1.)cheap psykers with full smite
-inquisitors
-primaris psyker
-Weird boy

2.) reinforced screen hammer - close assault units are pretty good at killing chaff, but most of them die to smite pretty badly. Super shooting lists + screen + smite bots are hard for many armies to deal with.

Wyldhunt wrote:

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 niv-mizzet wrote:
mortal wounds should've never gotten out of the gate in their current form. The "you take wounds and there's nothing you can do about it" mechanic should be reserved for orbital strikes, titan explosions, and the like.

Is it really fair to think of smite as a "there's nothing you can do about it" mechanic though? You can screen your expensive units, take psykers and anti-psyker options of your own (assuming your faction has any), use certain stratagems, etc. Excluding things like special rules and stratagems that let you actively resist incoming attacks, it actually kind of seems like you have more ability to actively resist enemy smites than you do enemy shooting. Sure, smite is relatively efficient against heavily armored, expensive models, but isn't that comparable to a meltagun being efficient against a vehicle?

Yes, it is fair to think of it that way. It is a relatively simple matter to have smites coming from highly mobile or deep striking units. Not all armies have access to 4ppm chaff to surround every valuable unit on all sides while also allowing that unit the space to perform its function. Also, many of the "smite-like" powers let you target what you want.

Meltaguns at least tend not to be efficient against small targets, and some of the high priority targets that they want to hit, like a character, tend to have invulns and still get a save. A smite can still drop 6 of them in one go, or 3 2-wound models, or just outright slay a character. Kinda like the old rolling a 6 on a D thing from 7e.

I'm not really asking for average joe the marine to be more defensible against smites, I just want legendary chapter masters wearing terminator armor, iron halos, holding storm shields, and being protected by 18 flavors of other relics to not die with no defense rolls to random_unnamed_psyker_06 as soon as he looks at them funny. Or to two rhino explosions, for that matter.
As I said, it's not necessarily smite I have a problem with, but mortal wounds in general shouldn't be on 90% of the things they're on.

The problem with smite... mortal wounds...

Mortal wounds, a great idea that was poorly implemented and very easy for some factions to initially exploit. Most of the exploitation has been curbed.

I still say mortal wounds in their current incarnation was/is a mistake.

Smite just happened to be the easy thing to point at.

clownshoes wrote:
The problem with smite... mortal wounds...

Mortal wounds, a great idea that was poorly implemented and very easy for some factions to initially exploit. Most of the exploitation has been curbed.

I still say mortal wounds in their current incarnation was/is a mistake.

Smite just happened to be the easy thing to point at.

Indeed this. Smite is the poster boy for MW's, but it's really the MW's that are the issue.

Astropaths only got to roll their smites on one die, and still got nerfed. Made me sad, since I didn't even use them for smites.

I think smite itself just needs to be toned down, maybe it's one wound and d3 on a 10+. The biggest backlash towards smite is that it is one of the only sources of mortal wounds, and only some armies can spam it. We still don't like the idea of our psykers doing all the damage: being more unstoppable than lascannons or thunderhammers.

Nahh, I disagree. I like that Mortal Wounds are in the game to help out against inv. saves. Having buffed out, nigh unkillable models is bad for the game, imo. Mortal Wounds are a great equalizer in that regard.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Nahh, I disagree. I like that Mortal Wounds are in the game to help out against inv. saves. Having buffed out, nigh unkillable models is bad for the game, imo. Mortal Wounds are a great equalizer in that regard.

Inv saves aren't problem. In 8th ed there's no unit that's really too tough for points by having high protections. Do you know THE toughest models in game? You are looking at IG trooper/brimstone(even without inv save)/cultist type. It's the hordes armies struggle to get rid of point efficiently. Not monsters/elite units smite spam or not.

 Insectum7 wrote:
Nahh, I disagree. I like that Mortal Wounds are in the game to help out against inv. saves. Having buffed out, nigh unkillable models is bad for the game, imo. Mortal Wounds are a great equalizer in that regard.

I have yet to run into such a model. Now that multiple damage is a thing, you can have boss as heck captains with all the protections ever, and one failed save can cripple or kill them.

The closest thing to unkillable are the things that clock in at 4-5 points per wound since they still haven't fixed traditionally anti-horde weapons so that they adequately answer hordes.

Smite isn't a problem because it's OP, it's a problem because it's an irritating thing to have in the game. There are two main problems:

A): GW is terrible at making psykers/Wizards scale sensibly. The way denial works combined with the fact that some armies can get psykers in every slot and some armies can't get any psykers at all means that a good percentage of the time your opponent has no way of interacting with smite, it's just a thing that happens and screws you up. But from the player with the psykers' perspective they've got a problem of diminishing returns from taking more psykers because of the one-cast-attempt-per-turn problem, which ends up making people complaining about smite feel annoying. And what ends up happening is that the 8e psyker implementation feels bad for everyone most of the time.

B): The mechanism by which Smite is written into the game is a stupid idea. By making all psykers' fallback attack power a few mortal wounds you make psykers a specialized one-trick mess that are incredibly cost-effective when thrown at heavy infantry with Invulnerable saves (Custodians, Wraiths, that sort of thing) and most vehicles, but an incredible waste of time against anyone who's got cheap infantry and enough positional flexibility to make them the closest target. Since this is a game-wide mechanic that transcends armies/Codexes it screws psyker armies by handing them a long built-in list of terrible matchups and it screws some small-model-count armies by handing a wide range of armies a tool that hard-counters a lot of their stuff.

It'd be better if instead of a Smite power that caused mortal wounds psykers had powers with weapon profiles that could be interacted with like weapons, and "psyker" the keyword and "psyker" the lore concept got split up so you could restrict things that use the actual psychic power mechanics to the HQ slot so you couldn't just overwhelm any ability to deny powers with sheer brute quantity of psykers, but that isn't how GW decided to write 8th, so that's where we are.

(Addendum: Given some of my experiences using Smite against Wraiths and Hammernators I am in favour of leaving some kind of Invul-ignoring or Invul-reducing option in play.)

(Further addendum: Tau could also stand to have some kind of client-race psyker (lorewise a Kroot Shaman makes the most sense) and some of the Necron anti-psychic tech needs to get rules so we don't have two entire army books that can't interact with the psychic rules in any way.)

 niv-mizzet wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
Nahh, I disagree. I like that Mortal Wounds are in the game to help out against inv. saves. Having buffed out, nigh unkillable models is bad for the game, imo. Mortal Wounds are a great equalizer in that regard.

I have yet to run into such a model. Now that multiple damage is a thing, you can have boss as heck captains with all the protections ever, and one failed save can cripple or kill them.

The closest thing to unkillable are the things that clock in at 4-5 points per wound since they still haven't fixed traditionally anti-horde weapons so that they adequately answer hordes.

For sure invulnerable saves plus rerollables aren't quite what they used to be, but even 2+ 3++ is obnoxious. I'm not a much a fan of hero hammer. I like that Smite exists as a hard counter to "superman" tactics, and also means that basic squads and heroes mutually support each other. Hero buffs squad, squad protects hero, hero inyervenes on squads behalf. It's interesting.

The one problem with smite, and psychic powers in general for me, are that there is very little real defence for some armies. I played a 1000pts all biker army against Death Guard last week, opponent seized and thanks to the deployment had cast enough smite and plague winds, among others, to take out almost half my army before I got to do anything. 3 Psykers in 1000pts with each one causing an average of 4 mortal wounds left my army in a pretty bad way.

I do like the way they have done it with GK, making smite a reduced range that only causes 1 mortal wound regardless of the roll, with it being increased to 3 if the target has the daemon key word. Something like that could work, say with only 3 wounds going off on a 12 or something.

Again that 2/3 inv guy is easier to take out than 4point horde if you factor in points. If that is too tough why you aren"t asking for cultists etc to be made softer?

The main problem with Smite is some people dislike the Mortal Wounds mechanic, and Smite is the most commonly encountered source of Mortal Wounds.

The other problem is people who play low model count uber armies, taking offense that you actually put a wound on their model that was -1 to hit with 2+,3++,5+++ saves. It doesn't occur to them that is pretty much why Mortal Wounds attacks exist in the first place.

Mortal wounds are also a bit of an issue atm. Because it ignores all defenses save for the exceptionally rare fnp save, it further pushes the edition towards cheap hordes. While it's fairly minor it is still worth mentioning. It basically punishes already highly priced elite armies for merely being elite armies. Which also ties into how few ways there are to punish horde armies for being hordes.

I think the issue with smite spam goes beyond mortal wounds issues. The main issue of the smite spam strategy for players to play against, is that usually it is characters casting the smite (so they can’t be targeted) and, there is a rather large screening unit or 2 protecting them.

This leads to a compounding factor of not being able to get to the characters whilst also then having no defence against them.

Personally, I think smite should have an adapted Rule of 1 rule. Something like a casting limit of 3 attempts rather than unlimited. (this would affect all versions of smite – but would have to be adjusted for certain armies, likely Grey Knights, Thousand Sons, Eldar and Daemons to represent their ability/reliance with psychic power).

Mortal wounds is a crucial and necessary component of the game, acting as a hard counter to stacked hit-modifiers and rerollable invulnerable saves. But mortal wounds needs to be expensive because they are potentially very powerful. I don't think any full-smiting psyker should be less than 60-70 points.

 adamsouza wrote:
The main problem with Smite is some people dislike the Mortal Wounds mechanic, and Smite is the most commonly encountered source of Mortal Wounds.

The other problem is people who play low model count uber armies, taking offense that you actually put a wound on their model that was -1 to hit with 2+,3++,5+++ saves. It doesn't occur to them that is pretty much why Mortal Wounds attacks exist in the first place.

Or you could you know just shoot them seeing they are lot easier to take out by points than say chaos cultist or ork boyz.

You DO know don't you that game has no true anti-horde weapon right now?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

pismakron wrote:
Mortal wounds is a crucial and necessary component of the game, acting as a hard counter to stacked hit-modifiers and rerollable invulnerable saves. But mortal wounds needs to be expensive because they are potentially very powerful. I don't think any full-smiting psyker should be less than 60-70 points.

Ah right the "softer per points" units really needs yet another way to get rid of them. Guess people want to just play cultists etc.

tneva82 wrote:

You DO know don't you that game has no true anti-horde weapon right now?

It has at least one.

pismakron wrote:

tneva82 wrote:

You DO know don't you that game has no true anti-horde weapon right now?

It has at least one.

Really? Can you name one? Because in order to be more efficient at killing Guardsmen than Space Marines said anti-horde weapon would have to have Strength 2 AP-. The only thing I can think of that actually has that is Gretchin in close combat - and even their shooting is Strength 3.

Edit: And even that weapon would be a weirdly effective anti-tank weapon.